1speed
Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
People are conditioned to the bare minimum now: news is always sound bytes, stories break in 140 characters on Twitter, social media's entire feedback loop is built on the concept of a like button, and big data is being used to customize every banner ad you see to your personal interests. There is no room for contemplation or engagement in that design because it's all about instant feedback. It's everywhere (check out Slate.com, for example -- they tag every article they post with an estimate of how quickly you can read it.) Everything is designed toward the minimum possible engagement. And that can be good, bad or both ...
Good: no longer having to sift through pages of sh*t to find the thing you want to buy because your buying habits in the past help to filter to your most likely interests.
Bad: your example here if you are looking for actual human feedback.
Both: you can now link to many people with common interests you may have never had a chance to meet in the past, bute with that comes a good chance that you've never actually met many of the people you will identify as "friends" on social media (so that arguably the very social nature of our species is being reduced to its bare minimum.)
But it's the design of the times and chances are removing that "like" button would be more likely to kill any interaction now because people are conditioned by all their other online activity to simply react with a button click. If you ask more of them, you may find that they're not willing to put in that effort or (worse) they don't know how to react in that way anymore.
Personally, I'm with you that it's a shame, but I don't know if I would say the like button on this site is the culprit. I think the mindset behind the "gimme it now" phenomenon of online life in general is why that button is actually necessary now if you want any kind of reaction. I read most of my news online now and I've found the same thought process infecting articles online. In fact, it's gotten to the point where we actually separate the very locations of involved journalism from the "bare minimum" sound byte articles. For example, if you want to read a long form opinion or article about something nowadays, you have to go to a site that is literally called "longform". That;s kind of funny and a little bit sad when you think about it - chances are that's necessary because those kind of articles are like vintage record stores and brick and mortar book stores: surviving almost exclusively for a subset of the population driven by the nostalgia of what they used to represent.
Good: no longer having to sift through pages of sh*t to find the thing you want to buy because your buying habits in the past help to filter to your most likely interests.
Bad: your example here if you are looking for actual human feedback.
Both: you can now link to many people with common interests you may have never had a chance to meet in the past, bute with that comes a good chance that you've never actually met many of the people you will identify as "friends" on social media (so that arguably the very social nature of our species is being reduced to its bare minimum.)
But it's the design of the times and chances are removing that "like" button would be more likely to kill any interaction now because people are conditioned by all their other online activity to simply react with a button click. If you ask more of them, you may find that they're not willing to put in that effort or (worse) they don't know how to react in that way anymore.
Personally, I'm with you that it's a shame, but I don't know if I would say the like button on this site is the culprit. I think the mindset behind the "gimme it now" phenomenon of online life in general is why that button is actually necessary now if you want any kind of reaction. I read most of my news online now and I've found the same thought process infecting articles online. In fact, it's gotten to the point where we actually separate the very locations of involved journalism from the "bare minimum" sound byte articles. For example, if you want to read a long form opinion or article about something nowadays, you have to go to a site that is literally called "longform". That;s kind of funny and a little bit sad when you think about it - chances are that's necessary because those kind of articles are like vintage record stores and brick and mortar book stores: surviving almost exclusively for a subset of the population driven by the nostalgia of what they used to represent.
